


borda sueño en mangas de camisa

by thisstableground



Series: ITH main timeline [1]
Category: In the Heights - Miranda/Hudes
Genre: Family Feels, Gen, it's babysnavi hours folks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-18
Updated: 2019-10-18
Packaged: 2020-12-23 16:54:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21084683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisstableground/pseuds/thisstableground
Summary: Claudia may be everyone's Abuela, but she never really had a grandchild she'd call her own and never thought she would, until the De la Vegas move to New York.





	borda sueño en mangas de camisa

**Author's Note:**

> I just love baby Usnavi and I love Claudia and I love the De la Vegas and I love that they all love each other. Title's from Rompiendo Fuente by Juan Luis Guerra.
> 
> [Minor warning: talk of previous miscarriages, a difficult birth and some vague hints of post-partum depression. It doesn't get too in-depth or medical about any of it, but just in case.]

The day that Claudia and her mama arrived in Nueva York it was December and, as she remembers it through the exaggerated eyes of childhood, dark as night even in the middle of the day. Dark, cold, the sky blocked out by fog and cloud and buildings and dirt. The first night together in their basement floor apartment, huddling together against the cold in the single bed they shared, Claudia had asked, “¿Mama, cuándo vamos a casa?”

“No por un tiempo,” Mama had said.

It wasn’t till many years later that Claudia understood this really meant “never”, many years even after the children of el barrio who had affectionately come to know her as Tía Claudia had children of their own and she became Abuela, and as Abuela she finally accepted that in its own way, Nueva York was home now. Long enough that even if she ever managed to return to Cuba, it wouldn’t be the Cuba she knew, the Cuba of her childhood frozen in time and tinged with the rosy hindsight of being too young to care about money or politics or anything but the sky above her. Perhaps the Cuba she remembers never even existed anywhere but her heart, but either way there it stayed unchanging across the decades, and now in her old age she sits out on the stoop of her apartment building en Washington Heights and tosses breadcrumbs to the pigeons, the descendant cousins of the birds she once fed in the streets of La Vibora.

It’s here that Claudia first sees the two of them - or the three of them, she amends, as she notices the slight swell of the woman’s belly under a large shirt that looks as though it must belong to the small, slender man with his arm around her shoulders.

“The super said the keys are at the taxi dispatch,” he is saying, as Claudia listens from a few feet away. “Espera aquí, don’t tire yourself out.”

“No demasiado embarazada caminar, Mateo,” the wife protests.

The husband, Mateo, simply kisses her cheek and says, “But I would not dream of letting you. Chivalry, mi amor!”

His wife laughs at him as he leaves, shaking her head. Claudia laughs too, quietly. From this stoop Claudia and her birds have seen many new arrivals, on grey days and clear, new faces with familiar expressions of regret, hope, uncertainty. Today it is a bright day in late summer, the late day’s sunlight glowing on the woman’s face as she looks up at the building that was until recently a deliand she looks happy to be here. These are the new owners, then. They catch eyes, and Claudia raises her hand in a greeting.

The other woman starts to return the wave then suddenly clutches at her belly instead, with a shining, shocked expression. “¡El bebé está pateando!” she calls, excitedly. 

“¡Qué maravilla!” Claudia calls back. She moves over to make space for the woman to come and join her on the stoop. “He must be happy to be here!”

“Yo también lo creo,” the woman says, huffing a little with effort as she sits. “On the way here we look at all los barcos and we see there a boat is called Usnavy, and I feel the kicks for the first time! So Mateo says this is what we must name the baby, but we spell it with an ‘i’ and make it un nombre real.”

“It’s a lovely name,” Claudia agrees. “Niño o niña?”

“Ah, we will not know yet. Por ahora, just Usnavi. Oh! ¡Sientelo!”

She grabs Claudia’s hand and places it against her belly, and Claudia can tell already from the love on this woman’s face and the smile in her eyes that she’s going to like her. It’s hard not to like someone who so joyfully shares her child’s name before she even shares her own, and there’s the faintest heartbeat sensation of a thud, a tiny fist or foot flailing around as Claudia holds her hand there.

“Mucho gusto, Usnavi,” she says. “My name is Claudia, but most people call me Abuela.”

***

Mateo is waiting to meet Claudia’s taxi outside the emergency room, and he opens the door for her with a sombre expression on his usually smiling face. 

For a few years during her thirties, one of Claudia’s many jobs was as a night shift cleaner at the emergency room in Hudson Heights. She’d trek through the corridors with her trolley of cleaning supplies and bear unnoticed witness to the darkest hours of people’s nights. Doctors on the end of their shift awake only through willpower and strong café, the strained conversations of accompanying friends or relatives trying to stay calm, and everyone with their eyes so worried and weary. This is a different hospital, but the burden weighs the same: familiar, how Mateo’s eyes look now, his voice as he apologizes for bringing her out here at this time of night. 

“No seas tonto, of course I would come,” she says. The January wind is bitter even through many layers: she follows him eagerly through the doors into the warmth of the waiting room. They briskly bypass people in chairs and she’s half-running to keep up with Mateo’s pace. “¿Comó están?”

Mateo takes a left, another left, stops abruptly as they reach a smaller waiting room than the one en la entrada. “Rosa is fine. She’s sleeping off the drugs now, but they say that she’ll be awake in a few hours.”

“¿Y el bebé?”

“Usnavi is…alive,” he says. He takes a seat, his face grim. “He wasn’t…he wasn’t breathing, when he came out. Claudia, los médicos, they won’t let me see him, they took him away so quickly. I haven’t even held him yet.”

Claudia takes off her bufanda, her abrigo, sits down with an arm around Mateo’s shoulders. He leans against her, sniffling like a little boy with a scuffed knee. They wait too long together en silencio until Mateo says, “When Rosa woke me up, she— I thought… it’s just too early. He wasn’t supposed to be here until March.”

She isn’t foolish enough to cheer him up with platitudes. Instead, she says, “un niño, then?”

“Sí, un niño,” Mateo says, and makes a breathlessly disbelieving noise. "Tengo un _hijo__.”_

Claudia squeezes her arm around him. “I can’t wait to meet him.”

Mateo laughs, or maybe he is crying. “Claramente he felt the same. Couldn’t even wait till —” 

He stops, looking terrified as a doctor approaches, but the doctor smiles at them and Claudia feels her heart unclench: this is not the way somebody looks who is bringing bad news.

“Mr De la Vega,” he says, “Your son is stabilized. Do you want to come see him?”

Mateo stays frozen for a minute, then stands up. “He’s okay?”

“Yes, he is,” the doctor says, smiling a little more. It must be a relief, Claudia thinks, to be able to bring some good news in this job. “He’ll need to stay in the NICU for a while but—”

Mateo says, very loudly, “I need to meet my baby!” and bolts off down the corridor before the doctor has a chance to finish. The doctor gives a helpless shrug at Claudia and says, “are you the grandmother?”

“Yes,” Claudia says. Well, that _is_ what abuela means, sí? And that’s what they all call her, so it isn’t a lie, and ciertamente not one she’d feel bad about even if it was. The De la Vegas have no familia in America but themselves, so Claudia will have to do. She gathers up her things and makes a _vamos _gesture at the doctor. “Go! We must follow him.”

They catch up with Mateo outside the NICU, washing his hands under the supervision of a duty nurse before he goes in. Claudia washes her hands too, and once they’re on the ward she stands quietly to the side. Mateo is blocking her view of the baby as the doctor explains about light therapy for jaundice, about the tube attached to a machine that will breathe for him, so many things that Claudia finds it impossible to keep up, finds it impossible to believe that Mateo is just nodding along calmly. It all sounds so frightening, so complicated. Perhaps he isn’t really listening: the doctor asks if he has any questions, and Mateo immediately blurts, “can I hold him?” with desperation in his voice.

“I’m sorry, but it will be a while before that’s possible,” the doctor says. Claudia can comprehend that much, at least, and what a terrible thing. “But here, you can touch his hand through this gap in the side of the incubator for a while, as long as it doesn’t upset him. Premature newborns are easily overstimulated.”

“Okay,” Mateo murmurs, reaching in. The doctor walks away further down the ward. Claudia hangs back at a distance still. Mateo is staring into the incubator, his hand against his baby’s hand, and his back is to her but she thinks that to see his face right now would break her heart. To interrupt him might break his. This moment is not for her: to be this close to it is painful and lovely enough.

An impossibly long time later, Mateo reluctantly steps away from the incubator and says, “I need to see Rosa, she’ll fight every doctor in this place to get to him if I’m not there to stop her when she wakes up. Can you…can you watch Usnavi for me? Look after him? I’ll be back tan pronto como puedo.”

“Claro.”

“Gracias, Claudia,” he says, and kisses her cheek, gives a last longing look at the baby before he leaves. 

Left alone, Claudia finally sees Usnavi De la Vega properly for the first time, and can’t help but gasp. ¡Qué _pequeño_! Only about the size of her hand, dwarfed by the glass box he’s laying in. He’s wearing nothing but a diaper that’s huge on his unbelievably tiny body, the breathing tube in his nose alien and upsetting, an eye mask shielding him from the blue lights that cast his skin in strange hues.

Claudia says, “_oh_!” and puts her hand against the glass, not daring to reach in through the gap like Mateo did. Qué extraño, these nerves. Claudia isn’t a nervous woman and Usnavi isn’t the first infant she’s spent time with. She’s met and held and adored plenty of them, been there to give out hugs and love and advice and that’s why they all call her Abuela. But oh, he’s such a surprise, she’s never seen anyone so small, never met someone right at the very beginning of their life like this. And for Mateo to call her up in the middle of the night because she’s the first person he thought could comfort him when he thought his little family might be falling apart in front of his eyes? What did she do to earn a trust like that after only a few months of friendship?

“I hope you know you’ve given everyone a lot of trouble tonight, Usnavi,” she scolds him in a whisper, wagging a finger at him. “And what was the rush? You could not have waited un poco más? Tus pobres padres, you make sure you get big and healthy for them muy pronto.” 

Finally finding the courage to reach inside the incubator, she touches his arm, carefully away from any of the wires attached to him. He feels fragile and hollow-boned like a baby bird, like he could break under her finger, but it doesn’t seem to upset him: he just moves one of his little fists in response, gently punching himself in the face. Claudia laughs, and it burns in her chest. There’s many once-new experiences that become commonplace over sixty years of living, but this boy, this moment, this feeling, are all as unfamiliar as they are precious. She hadn’t expected this at all.

***

Claudia started work at the age of twelve alongside her mama, back when people weren’t so concerned about that kind of thing. The cleaning got done twice as fast for the same price, so nobody complained or asked questions. She’s never been afraid of hard work or getting her hands dirty, when it’s the difference between putting food on the table or not, and she never slowed down until the cleaning agency made her take partial retirement last year after that _tiny _little problema cardíaco. It’s impossible to get hired anywhere new at her age to make up the hours, but they insisted that she was an insurance liability, so she reluctantly takes a disability check and only works four mornings a week. There’s so much time left in the day when she gets back that she doesn’t know what to do with it, struggling to take a break from a lifetime of momentum.

Perhaps this is part of why she found herself drawn to the De la Vegas when they moved in. Something new and vibrant to fill the hours, helping out where she can and living vicariously through their work ethic. They never seem to stop: Mateo was in full swing setting the store up almost as soon as they arrived, clearing out old junk, roping in Kevin and a few drivers to help him put the new sign and awning up. Rosa was always there every day too, cleaning or carrying lighter things, and during the summer Claudia often found her sitting on a folding chair outside under the awning, furiously studying an English textbook and practising pronunciation while Mateo put up shelves inside, determined to be fluent enough to teach the baby both languages from birth. The bodega was in business within a week, and the traffic that flows through it never ending, especially once word of Mateo’s café got around.

The early new arrival hasn’t slowed things down. Every minute Mateo’s not at the hospital has been spent working en la tienda. The bills can’t be cheap, but of course he won’t say anything about that, acting as though everything’s fine. What’s more, he’s doing it all alone since Rosa is still supposed to be resting and recovering. Claudia will admit she’s been concerned about both of them, checks in as often as she can, but it will be easier for everyone, she thinks, now that Usnavi has finally been out of hospital for two days.

Equivocado, aparamente: when Claudia goes to visit Rosa after finishing her so-short morning shift, the poor woman looks even worse off than before, like she’s been awake for a month.

“That’s just motherhood,” Rosa says, in a brittle bravado voice when Claudia says as much. She rearranges Usnavi against her as she feeds him, moving her shirt which has dropped over his head a little with the same look of bewildered love that she’s had every time Claudia has seen them together, as though she’s still surprised he’s here.

“It must be good to finally bring him home,” Claudia says.

Rosa stares at her, and then bursts into tears. She covers her mouth with her hand to muffle it.

“Ay, ¿qué pasa?!” Claudia grabs her shoulder, which she’s holding so stiff trying not to jostle Usnavi. “What is it?

“Es tonto,” she weeps, dabbing her eyes on the edge of Usnavi’s blanket. “Es tan tonto, I can’t help it. Iknow I should be happy to have him home, but there were so many people to look after him at the hospital and now it’s just me, Mateo is never _here_ and it isn’t his fault but...”

“This is normal,” Claudia reassures her. “It is always tiring, a new little one. It won't be so hard always.”

Rosa shakes her head and bends closer to Usnavi, tears dripping into his fine, flyaway black hair. “I was pregnant twice, before him. We lost both of them before I even felt them moving. And we were so happy when things seemed so good with Usnavi, and then when it happened it felt just like—” 

“Ay, mijita…” Claudia is lost for words. “But Usnavi is here, you must think about that, now. They wouldn’t have sent him home if he wasn’t ready to be here.”

“Mateo kept saying I should take it easy, he said I should be resting more but there was so much work to do with the store and I thought I knew how much I could handle. I thought I knew how much the baby could handle.”

“Sometimes things like this happen. Nobody is to blame.”

“It doesn’t feel like that,” Rosa says. Usnavi, finished with his lunch, is getting restless, squirming his arms around and making a squashed sort of grumbling noise. She pulls her shirt back down and distractedly hugs him to her. “I feel so crazy. I love him so much and it makes me feel like I am dying all the time.”

She looks at Claudia like she thinks she can fix it. But what can Claudia do? She’s never had a baby to lose, she’s never had a baby to worry about, all day, all night. Though she worries about Usnavi frequently, but what Rosa is talking about , she thinks, is different, and more than Claudia can understand. 

But if theres one thing she knows, a good night’s sleep makes a lot of things much better, or at least will distract for a little while. “Pobrecita, this is too much for you when you are so tired. You need to rest.”

“I _can’t_. He cries so quiet, if I sleep I worry I will not hear him when he needs me.”

“And I am just furniture, supongo? I can watch Usnavi while you sleep.”

“Pero—“

“Pero nada,” Claudia says, and plucks Usnavi out of her arms. “I wouldn’t let anything happen to him, would I?”

Rosa hesitates, looking a little like she wants to grab the baby back off her and make a run for it.

_“Would _I?” Claudia persists.

“No, Abuela,” Rosa says, shoulders going slack. The rest of her quickly follows, nothing at all of the firm, headstrong Rosa she usually is, and she limply accepts her fate as Claudia pushes her gently towards her bed. 

_Poor thing_, Claudia thinks, as she paces round with Usnavi, patting his back. He burps, then hiccups, then throws up leche over them both.

“That’s no way to treat your elders,” Claudia admonishes him. “¿Sientes mejor ahora?”

Usnavi grizzles quietly:_ no, I don’t_. It takes some searching around the chaos of the room to find him clean pijamas among discarded soiled ones, the unsorted overnight bags and welcome home cards, packets of wipes. There obviously hasn’t been much time for tidying yet.

“Bueno,” she says once he’s clean and buttoned up. Big enough to come home or not, the 0-3 months onesie still flops far over his hands and hangs loose around his feet. “See, we do just fine, don’t we, Usnavi?”

Usnavi gives a tragic wail of disagreement. And no wonder Rosa’s worried about not hearing it when she sleeps: still he makes just that soft mewing sound, a kitten’s cry instead of a baby’s. But he’s definitely giving it everything he has, his face scrunching up and turning red, determined to make himself heard even though his little lungs can’t keep up with his feelings. It’ll be no time before he’s screaming the walls down.

“Everyone’s at it today," Claudia says, bouncing him softly. “Sh, sh, let your mama get some sleep. No llores, your abuela’s right here.”

***

Claudia isn’t one to dwell on the past, if she can help it. The life she had is the only one she'll ever have, and wishing or moping will never change that. She took full retirement back in March, and it’s easy enough to live without regret on sunny days where she feels young and lively, where she plays dominoes with other retirees at a folding card table set up the street, when she walks slowly up and down the block to peer into storefronts and see who’s who and what’s happening. Her life in youth was full of work, and her life in age is full of friendship, and neither feels wasted. 

There were things she never had, claro. Never that winning lotto ticket her mama always hoped they'd find. Never the husband and children that her mama hoped Claudia would have, either. She isn’t sure why: it wasn’t a decision she ever made, to not have them. It simply…didn’t happen.

So long ago as a young woman, she remembers talking with other girls about what their husbands would look like, talk like, act like. She always pretended she knew her type, knew her future just like they did, but she never could picture that life for herself. She never could picture any child that she’d call her own. Still, sometimes she thinks about these children that never were. What would she have taught them, what would they teach her? Would she raise them back in Cuba? Would they look like her, or her mama, or like some yet-unknown husband, or her own father who she can barely remember before he passed?  She tries not to regret, and mostly doesn't, but this is what she thinks of on days like today, when the weather keeps her inside, when she feels the years in her bones and the emptiness in her home and wonders when she got old. It’s mornings when the floors have already been swept and the dishes washed and the prayers recited and it isn’t even nine o’clock yet, when there’s nothing but the ache of the rain, that she sometimes wonders, what _if_?

No more time to dwell on it today, though; a key in the lock and a siren-loud shriek interrupt her thoughts. Claudia forgets her weary legs and stands up to shoo Rosa and Usnavi inside.

“Mateo said you didn’t come for your lotto ticket this morning, so we brought it for you,” Rosa says.

“You shouldn't have come out in the rain just for that.”

“Muy tarde, we already did.” She pulls the red bandana out of her hair. Usnavi, strapped in the carrier on her chest, shouts “behp!” as she dabs it over him, drying him off.

“Well, then, if you are here you must let me see my Usnavito up close,” Claudia demands, and huffs an exaggerated _oof _as Rosa obligingly passes her the baby. Never mind when did she get old, when did _he _get so old? She hardly noticed it happening, but the past six months have done wonders for him: still small for his age, or so the doctor says, but healthy now, gordito y fuerte, and color to his cheeks. And whatever he lacks in size he’s learned to make up for in volume, hollering his enthusiastic baby-jargon at her as they take a seat on the couch.

Rosa beams at both of them, tying her now-damp bandana back up. These months have done her good too. She still seems tired - and who can blame her, when Usnavi grew quickly into such an energetic little thing that you’d need five arms and four more parents to manage _without_ being tired. Dios los ayude when he starts crawling - but she’s settled into a motherhood that suits her, especially since she started splitting days of working the store or childcare with Mateo, and recently even bringing Usnavi down to the counter in his carrier to keep them both company. There’s many things Claudia doesn’t understand or approve of in the younger generations, but she’s see enough strong women dissolve under the suffocation of domesticity that she’s certainly happy there’s more space for that nowadays. Nobody was made to spend all their time at home alone with only a baby, even a baby as wonderful as Usnavi.

“There’s something else, actually,” Rosa says. She looks a little nervous. “We meant to do this sooner but things have gone by so fast, and…well, we’re going to get Usnavi baptized soon, and we’d like for you to be his godmother.”

What a thing to drop out of nowhere! Claudia stares, speechless. Usnavi starts happily gumming at the collar of her blouse.

“It’s okay if you don’t want to,” Rosa reassures her hastily. “I know it’s a lot to ask, and we haven’t even known you so long but we were talking about it and after everything you’ve done for us, for Usnavi, you’d be the first person we’d want to raise him if anything were to happen."

_“Me? _Rosa, this is an honor, realmente, but have you _really_ thought about this? What could _I _give him? I do not have money, I did not go to school or—“

“You love him,” Rosa says. “As much as if he was your own. There’s nobody else I’d trust with him.”

Usnavi says, “pllbbtt.”

Claudia is reeling. It feels sometimes that by now she must have seen everything under the sun, and so encountering something totally new is always a surprise. Usnavi had surprised her the first day she met him, being so small, so very new, so instantly important. She’s surprised again now, at this sensation of happiness through tears, something she’s known before but never quite like _this_, so immediately and intensely that it feels like she’s just always been sobbing out grateful laughter. She does love him, so much, this noisy little ray of sunlight on all her grayest days.

Nobody gets to her age without a few what ifs, and though she tries not to regret, some days it's harder than others. But with her soon-to-be godson, her _grandson _in her arms, how could she regret anything that brought her here? If she were to imagine a child that she would call hers now, how could she imagine anything but soft, dark, downy hair, brown eyes too big for his little face, voice too big for his tiny frame, anyone other than her very own Usnavi?

“Is that a yes?” Rosa says, her voice full of warmth.

“Of course,” Claudia sputters. “Of course I will!” and she doesn’t feel the ache of age in her shoulders as she lifts Usnavi up above her head in delight. He says “gaa-aa-_ah_!” and she says, “¡Alabanza!”

**Author's Note:**

> whoever spots the most lowkey tragic foreshadowing and/or parallels to watch with serenity wins the prize! (the prize is Sadness)
> 
> Please leave a comment if you liked it, and come find me on [tumblr](https://thisstableground.tumblr.com) if tumbling's your thing


End file.
